Systemic Management 4

Sustainable human interactions with ecosystems and the biosphere, part 4

A book by Charles W. Fowler

Sustainable human interactions with ecosystems and the biosphere, part 4

Flaws in Our Use of Science

The limitations and imperfections of science have become a matter of principle. One of the main limitations of science is our inability to account for the unknown, especially in the construction of simulation models. It is one thing to know we leave out crucial information (omissions of important processes), it is yet another to know that there are things we cannot know to include. Another limitation of science is the inability to assign objective relative importance to the various subjects of scientific study (e.g. the never-ending nature/nurture debate). We have historically taken the subjective path by relying on human judgement (e.g. the politics involved in the last step in conventional management as depicted in Fig. 1.1) to account for the unknow in science and management. We scientists find it impossible to combine our information into a coherent synthesis free of subjective judgment and almost always ignore the unknown (the Humpty-Dumty syndrome, Fowler 2003).

Science often dismisses the statistically insignificant despite the known principle of sensitivity of systems to initial conditions (the butterfly effect).

Many things are too subtle to be detected by conventional scientific methodology.

Silo science is confined to the reductionistic. For some purposes, e.g. studying the Mpemba effect, drill down focused reductionist is just the thing. A systems given, however, is that systems are not only more complex than we know, they are more complex than we can know. We cannot know or control systems, but as Donella Meadows notes, we can dance with them.

Conventional decision making and management fail to find a way in which reductionism provides a path forward. There is very often a mismatch between the information used and the management question being addressed…. Taken as a whole, science has shown us that things are interconnected and complicated…. The products of science are dumped in the hands of stakeholders, managers, and teams of scientists who are asked to make sense of it all as part of making a decision (the information supplied to decision makers. We know that we humans are limited, yet that knowledge does not stop us from making decisions in defiance of the Humpty-Dumpty syndrome (converting and combining information selected from libraries full of available information to guide management. Conventional management has not found a way to use reductionistic science in a way that circumvents the problems of conventional decision making.

Yet the WSS persists in using/doing/repeating what does not work because what works is not in any stakeholder’s short-term self interest.

List of articles in this book review series: Systemic Management.